The First Tesla Model S in Iran and Central Asia

Charging in Bukhara, Uzkebistan

We had no wi-fi in our last hotel in Turkmenistan. Internet accessibility is still very low in Turkmenistan. The amount of sides that are not accessible, is on the other side extremely high. Due to no internet, we couldn’t check out any hotel ahead, before we arrived in Bukhara.

Sometimes one needs to be lucky. We were extremely lucky with the hotel we found in Bukhara. It was in a former madrasa that was beautifully renovated. In this nice surrounding, we enjoyed an extremely comfortably bed… since almost three months, we are sleeping every to every second night in a new bed. Some of them are extremely uncomfortable and make it hard (literally 😉) to sleep on them. Besides extremely hard mattresses, old mattresses with springs sticking out, are uncomfortable. I noticed that my sleep quality just depends on mattress quality and in that bed in Bukhara I slept like a baby.

Challenging charging due to heavy electricity fluctuation

We parked the Tesla behind a gate leading to the office of the hotel. There was a Schuko outlet that we could use for charging the car. Unfortunately, the electricity was very shaky. If the voltage is fluctuating too much, the Tesla stops charging. The cause of the fluctuation was probably that the transformer of the neighborhood wasn’t well adjusted to the electricity need of the people. We had similar problems in Turkey. During night, fewer people (and their machinery) are using electricity. The fluctuation is therefore lower and we were able to charge the car during the two subsequent nights that we were in Bukhara.

City-museum Bukhara

The old city of Bukhara is Unesco World Heritage. There is one architectural monument next to each other in the city. One wonders around old mosques, baths, madrasas and mausoleums. Most of them are decorated with beautiful tile-work in bright blue, turquoise and golden colors. We enjoyed this travel back in time.

Drive from Bukhara to Samarkand

The surface of the roads to Samarkand, the city we drove to after Bukhara, was only slightly better than the road leading to Bukhara from the border. We adjust our driving that way that we only go 50 to 70 km/h so we can avoid the potholes in the road.

We got stopped two times by the police on our way. Similar to toll collection booths in other countries, the police in Uzbekistan blocks in average every 100km the road. Either they ignore you or they point a stick at you and you need to stop. We started to only give copies of our documents to them, since we heard that some police could be corrupt and wants money to return you your documents. During the first police stop, they wrote our data us in a big book (the country isn’t very digital yet…). The officer at the second police stop insisted to see our original documents, but eventually he let us go. I have no idea what the aim of their controls is, so I continue to see no reason for them to flip through out passports as if they were picture books for children. I hope all the other police controls that will follow will be as smooth as the last were.